Georgia: Trump and Clinton virtually tied in new NBC-WSJ-Marist poll
By NBC-WSJ-Marist released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Georgia were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
NBC-WSJ-Marist poll results
Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 46.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between September 6 and September 8. The sample size was 649 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-3.8 percentage points, which means that the poll results for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not focus too much on the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 48.3% for Clinton and 51.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Georgia sees Trump at 51.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.6 percentage points lower than his corresponding numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 52.2% of the two-party vote in Georgia. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 0.5 points above his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's margin of error.
